


The Magnus Archives: Edward

by Kalhoon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25869241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalhoon/pseuds/Kalhoon
Summary: Edward never was a happy kid... but when Mathew decided to start babysitting he'd never thought he'd have to deal with a kid like THIS.
Kudos: 4





	The Magnus Archives: Edward

Edward never was a happy kid. He wasn't... depressed… or anything, there was just something wrong with him. The sort of wrong that you can't really put into words. It wasn't any one thing, just a sort of unsettling aura around him. Not the sort of shivers down your spine bullshit you get in stories, just a look he gave you. He would stare off into space for long periods of time, just smiling to himself, emptily… like there was a chunk of his soul missing. Sometimes he’d stare at me, like he was looking straight through me… and into my heart, judging me.

Sorry I’m getting ahead of myself, I should probably start at the beginning.

I lived in Ashland at the time, and the Dilbert family lived down the street from my house. I say house, it was really a garage that I rented… I just started college you see, so that was about all I could afford. It was pretty dumpy, the windows would rattle and a draft would usually blow through the room… But it was home, and I didn’t mind it too much.

When I had time I’d do a lot of baby sitting. It’s really easy money if you like kids, and you basically only get called nights so I could do classes during the day and get some studying in while the kids played. It was a pretty good gig.

This particular family usually called me up on a Friday night while they went out to parties. I don’t really drink, and honestly was more of a solitary person so I didn’t mind “missing out” on those nights…

It was always the same with this family. I’d show up with a textbook or two, cook the kid some dinner and then make notes for a few hours while he kept himself busy. The parents would come back, pay me for my time and then show me out. Like I said, he’d keep himself busy so it was really just a chance to study. Come to think of it… I don’t think he ever actually spoke to me… not really…

What he did do was draw. Always, all the time. Never stopping, just drawing. I mean that literally. It sounds silly to say about such a little kid, but really I don’t think he slept. The bags under the seven year olds eyes would say as much, and that empty look he always carried around… But he had energy, plenty of it. He’d always be frantically drawing in his sketchpad, like he was speaking in tongues through that single noir Crayola. 

Once the parents left, he’d go straight out the back door without a word. The first few times I just thought he liked to be outside or something, and as long as he wasn’t bothering me I didn’t mind. Then one night while I was cooking dinner, I looked out the window into the backyard. There was something moving out there, just on the edge of porch light. Suddenly it stopped, and the shape moved away. I figured it might be a raccoon, or a bear or… well people had been going missing so I was a little on edge seeing something big moving around the backyard, especially while I knew Edward was out there. For the area, it wasn’t that uncommon for bears to roam around in backyards, and as much as I hated the idea of it, I knew that you had to call the park rangers and… well… no more bear.

So, I went out to check, just to make sure everything was ok… Well it wasn’t a bear, but everything was most definitely not ok. Edward was no where to be found, but out in the middle of the semi-dark backyard was a little hand made wooden cross, the kind you might see in a Sunday school art room. Except I don’t think any Sunday school would let this into their class. Pinned up, like Jesus on the cross, was a little squirrel. Its front split down the middle and it’s organs neatly laid out in a semi-circle in front of it. I didn’t know what to do… I really couldn’t process what I was seeing. I just stood there, looking at it in transfixed horror. 

That was when started puking. I couldn’t stop. I puked till I felt green bile rising out of my throat. 

It was disgusting. Sure I was no stranger to gore… I love Saw as much as the next metalhead, but seeing an innocent little squirrel so neatly ripped open… I couldn’t take that. 

I didn’t really feel like this was the sort of thing to call anyone about though… The police? That seemed a bit extreme… I wish I had… but no point lamenting over past mistakes, Doc Brown spent a lot of time working with me on that one… I figured there wasn’t anything to do about it, so I just left it and went back inside to finish cooking…

This went on for weeks. I’d show up, start cooking, see some shifting outside and find a new squirrel out on a new cross. After the first few times I got bold, and so I started taking a bit of a closer look. I could tell it was a new one each time because it was always fresh, moist, and steaming. After a while I stopped bothering to check. You might be wondering why I kept coming back, but the pay was good, and the kid wasn’t a hassle other than… being weird… and so I decided to just put up with it.

YES I figured it was the kid doing the vivisections. It was always after he went outside, I’m not stupid I noticed the correlation, but I wasn’t going to call him out on it, I mean like I said, I didn’t feel like there was really anything to do about it… so I turned a blind eye and left him alone.

This one time, they called me up on a Tuesday. Edward’s mom had been growing quite the watermelon in her mid region, and that was the fateful night the little bugger was set to pop out. They called me over so quickly I didn’t have time to grab anything… my phone was almost dead and I had to keep it for emergencies… so it was just me and Edward… alone. I was bored. Bored out of my mind. I sat there about an hour just watching the kids little arm flail around on his sketchbook before I went snooping for something to do. 

They must have been the only family in the entire midwest who didn’t have cable, and their bookshelf consisted of his moms “adult entertainment” collection, a dictionary, some children’s books. Nothing interesting. Then on the bottom shelf was, “taxidermy for beginners”, followed by “human anatomy” and a strange red book. It stood out from all the others, something was just... wrong about it. On its faded crimson spine was a single symbol, a small flame. No title, no nothing, just the symbol. The books either side seemed slightly singed, and when I reached out to take it off the shelf the air felt warmer. I shouldn't have touched it, but I did. I barely brushed it with just the tips of my fingers, but they began to sear and I heard the flesh sizzle. It smelt horrible. None of that makes any sense... but that's what happened. 

I spent the next hour desperately trying to cool my wounded fingers, I'm just glad I didn't fully grab it. 

After I had dealt with my burnt fingers, I was once again bored. So driven by that, and some curiosity for what this kid got up to all day, I went over and asked him what he was doing.

“Hey… buddy. Watcha up to?”

No response. Didn’t even look up at me.

“Hey. Edward?”

I was a getting a bit worried. The kid didn’t even seem to know that I was there and his arms started vibrating even more vigorously on the page. Interrupted but unfazed in my pursuit of finding out what he was doing, I walked behind him to get a look over his shoulder.

I had a second to see a mass of dark… something before: SNAP. Book closed, he’s up. Off the floor. Staring right through me with those dead, unfocused eyes. 

“Edward, whatsup budy?” 

I said as I took a few steps backwards. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just started backing away. He seemed to like that and he went back to whatever it was he was drawing, and I decided that boredom wasn’t really all that bad.

I’m not one to get startled, so don’t tell anyone but that kid scared me shitless. He was just so off, something was so horribly wrong with him, and yet no one else seemed to notice. Like I said, the only reason I kept going back was because of the money but… even the persuading power of money has limits…

After a whole hour of walking around that dismal ass house, I came back to the find Edward wasn’t in his spot. I thought he’d gone to the bathroom or… something… so I thought, now’s my chance. I opened up the sketchbook to about the middle and started investigating. On the page was a drawing of my neighbor, Emily, and a fucking good one at that. Not just for a seven year old, just good in general, but kind of creepy. He had drawn her warm hazel eyes, her perfect jawline, that silky hair she always wore up in a pony tail. We never talked much, but she went to my university so we knew of each other. My friends always reckoned she had a thing for me, but… that doesn’t matter now. She went missing a while ago, it was nice to see her face again, although I couldn’t understand why he’d drawn her. There were others I recognized. My old mailman, dogs from missing pet posters, a friend who’d moved away without warning, others I didn’t recognize. In every drawing the people or animals looked… they looked restless… or, uncomfortable? With a streak of fear and disgust mixed in, maybe a little bit of rage as well. It was just really… really strange. There was other stuff. Just… stuff. Pens, pencils, water bottles, lamp shades, a set of dice, a toy car, all sorts of random stuff he’d drawn.

The last page was probably the worst. Not yet finished was a drawing of his unborn sister’s crib. I knew it was her’s because I’d seen the room while I was wandering around the house. From the view of the drawing, I was looking down into the crib. Down in the middle of a swath of blankets, was the baby. She lay there, on that wooden cross. Each limb cleanly separated from the torso. The arms laid out neatly above her head, like she was grabbing for something just out of reach. The toes on the dismembered legs perfectly pointed like a little ballerina. The head sat firmly a good three inches above the shoulders, staring right into the eyes of the observer, with Edward’s same dead smile, his same empty eyes. A line ran down from her neck to her stomach, and just like those squirrels, her organs were proudly presented in a neat circle around her. My hand brushed the page… it felt wet. I pulled away to see red… liquid… dripping down my wrist.

I started to panic, the sight of blood in real life makes me light headed, and it was seeping out of the pages now and streaming down my arms. Just then I heard a clicking noise behind me, like a massive spider flexing its mandibles. It was Edward, staring at me. His neck clicking as he snapped it side to side, trying to get a better look at me. He shot his arm out and started walking towards me. I was petrified and I just stood there, watching as he advanced on me. He snatched the book out of my hand and the blood began to seep back into the pages. That which was still running down my arm flowed down my legs and I saw it crawl through the carpet, and up Edward’s pant leg. Then it spilt out his sleeves and into the page. He sat down in his spot, and continued to draw.

I guess he figured I already knew about his sketchbook, so he didn’t care about hiding it any more. So this time when I looked over his shoulder as his hands shot across the page, he didn’t pull away. He had begun drawing a chair. As he did so, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a chair at the dining room table begin to slowly… fade…? It was as though it was being rubbed out of existence with an eraser. The fading moved along as Edward drew, until the chair was completely gone. Then he drew the tv, the couch, a coffee cup sitting on the table, the chandelier. He filled an entire page with objects from around the room, all of them slowly fading into nothing, then he flipped over and filled a second page. As the room emptied, Edward began to… crackle? Almost? Like he was being charged up. I could see sparks shooting out of the page, filling him with more and more energy. The previously dark circled eyes and pale face perked up, he looked invigorated, like a hunger was being quenched. Then all of the sudden he stopped. He flipped to a new page. And spun his head around, almost a full 180 degrees to look up at me. He put crayon to paper, and drew… a single finger… never lifting his eyes off me. As he did so I felt a searing pain shoot up my arm as I saw my finger begin to fade, replaced by a raw bleeding stump. He just smiled and closed the notebook.

I started running out of the room, fumbling to turn my phone on with the blood spilling down my forearm. I turned it on to find a photo of his sisters dead eyed face on my screen. I dropped it in alarm and I heard the screen shatter on the hard marble floor. I didn’t bother to grab it, I just kept moving, there had to be a phone in the house. I had put up with this for so long, become desensitized to his bullshit, but this was insane! I found a wall mounted phone and dialed 911. I didn’t know what to say, so I just yelled to the operator “HELP, I need help!”. At that moment Edward walked into the room, and I dropped the receiver.

His notebook was open again, and he was drawing something new. He just stood in the middle of the kitchen, desperately scribbling. This time he held his sketchbook low so I could see what it was he was drawing… I wanted to at least know what was going to happen so I edged closer to get a look. It was a drawing of a house. A simple house, nothing particularly special about it… except that as he added detail, I saw two people in the front window. The taller one was standing in front of the shorter one, and when Edward moved his hand across the sketchbook, I saw the shorter person’s arm shift slightly… that was when all the lights blew out.

His eyes sparkled an electric blue, and I could see his smile glint in what little light filtered through the windows from the street lamps outside. I could see his gaze shift up to meet my eyes. He stood there, staring at me, smiling as he finished his drawing. It was so dark I don’t know how I saw it, but I did. It was like, everything else was nearly pitch black, but somehow the pages in his sketchbook were visible, burning bright with those blue electric sparks, but not casting a light across the room… I don’t know how to explain it…

He only used black crayons, and so I still don’t know where he got the red from, but he started spilling bright flames across the paper, engulfing the house he’d drawn. At that moment I heard the smoke alarm begin to shriek. Smoke filled the air and it was all I could do to run out as the flames chased me. I hadn’t even thought about Edward, the idea of saving him never crossed my mind, I just dashed for the door, choking on the smoke filled air. 

I stopped once I reached the tarmac, and turned around to find that Edward too had made his way out. He stood there in the doorway. In his arms he held his sketchbook. It was open but he wasn’t drawing anything, he was just smiling at me with that empty look of his. He laughed as the flames lapped at his flesh. First the hair melted off his head. I could see it catch and slowly wick down to his scalp. Then the skin peeled away, charring as it fluttered to the floor. As his flesh sizzled and dripped down to the ground, I heard him utter the only words he ever said to me. He whispered in a way I could somehow hear “goodbye Martin”, and then he collapsed… soon the smoke alarm’s blare merged into police sirens, and… I don’t really remember much after that… I think I passed out but I’m not really sure.

Arson, murder, child abuse, endangering a minor… that's a lot of years. Doesn’t help my case much to plea “but he did it”! Even if the book survived the fire it wouldn’t be any sort of proof… it didn’t though, I saw it burn with a bright blue flame, heard the screams of those held inside its binding, saw the sparks shoot out of it as the Crayola markings melted… I just want someone to know what actually happened before I’m shut away for multiple life sentences. Maybe this can serve as a warning… I don’t really care if you take it, don’t even know what I’m warning you about… the world is a scary place… 

I just want someone to believe me.

End statement 

Supplemental information: 

There is little to follow up on. Police files show the arrest of one Mathew Birt around the time of the statement. The letter this statement is enclosed in has a stamp marking it as having been searched by prison guards and so presumably arrived after Mathew was taken into custody. He is still serving time in a undisclosed penitentiary. No body was found at the site of the fire, but Edward was still pronounced dead from eye witness reports stating that they saw the child burn in the doorway. One report states that an older woman living across the street saw the form shift and move after collapsing to the ground, like wax bubbling... then it flowed off the steps and into the garden. It is hard to give any evidence for this observation, but given the book described by Mathew, it is not out of the question that Edward had some connection to the light-less flame. I think we may have found an account of a self initiation. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work of fan fiction. This takes place in the Magnus Archives universe. The book, Cruor, is clearly a Lightener but of my own invention, and other than that there is no "direct" connection to the Magnus Archive characters.


End file.
